Ordinary Prussians
Brandenburg Junkers and Villagers, 1500–1840

A major contribution to debates in German history over the origins of modern political authoritarianism.

William W. Hagen (Author)

9780521037006, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 1 November 2007

712 pages, 22 b/w illus. 3 maps
23.5 x 15.7 x 3.5 cm, 0.981 kg

'… this is an excellent, thought-provoking book … Each chapter brims with compelling stories about local experience, while making a larger point about the transition to 'modernity'. all n all, this is a model study and fruitful ground for future comparative work.' Sixteenth Century Journal

This book gives voice, in unusual depth and immediacy, to ordinary villagers and landlords (Junkers) in the Prussian-German countryside, from the late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. The trials and fortunes of everyday life come into view - in the family, the workplace, in the private lives of both men and women, in courtroom and jailhouse, and under the gaze of the rising Prussian monarchy's officials and army officers. What emerges is a many-dimensioned, long-term study of a rural society, inviting comparisons on a world-historical level. The book also puts to a test the possibilities of empirical historical knowledge at the microhistorical or 'grass-roots' level. But it also reconceptualizes, on the scale of Prussian-German and European history, the rise of agrarian capitalism, challenging views widespread in the economic history literature on the common people's working standards, and including massive documentation on women's condition, rights and social roles.

List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Currencies, weights and measures employed in the text
Introduction: grand narratives, ordinary Prussians
1. After the deluge: a noble lordship's sixteenth-century ascent and seventeenth-century crisis
2. The Prussianization of the countryside? Noble lordship under early absolutism, 1648–1728
3. Village identities in social practice and law
4. Daily bread: village farm incomes, living standards and lifespans
5. The Kleists' good fortune: family strategies and estate management in an eighteenth-century noble lineage
6. Noble lordship's servitors and clients: estate managers, artisans, clergymen, domestic servants
7. Farm servants, young and old: landless labourers in the villages and at the manor
8. Policing crime and the moral order, 1700–1760: seigneurial court, village mayors, church, state and army
9. Policing seigneurial rent: the Kleists' battle with their subjects' insubordination and the villagers' appeals to royal justice, 1727–1806
10. Seigneurial bond severed: from subject farmers to freeholders, from compulsory estate labourers to free, 1806–1840
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Economic history [KCZ], Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC], Historical geography [HBTP], Social & cultural history [HBTB], European history [HBJD]